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Screenshot of Snapchat

Facebook has got its engineers tinkering on a service to compete with the wildly-popular app Snapchat, according to a report in All Things D, which cites sources close to the matter. This probably won't come as a surprise. Facebook needs to make itself more relevant to the world of mobile communication if it wants to continue being profitable, and as such it must chase after new trends in mobile communication pioneered by other popular services. Earlier this month it also launched its Messenger app for Android, essentially Facebook's way of catching up with an array of popular, cross-platform texting services like WhatsApp and GroupMe.

So what is so great about Snapchat? For the uninitiated, Snapchat is a photo-messaging service that allows you to send photos that will self-destruct after a designated length of time. Sometimes just few seconds. That may seem counter-intuitive -- why take a photo if it is only going to be destroyed? Yet users of the network are sending around 50 million photos a day, many of them self-portraits. It is currently the ninth most popular free app on Apple's App Store. Snapchat has meanwhile developed a somewhat seedy reputation as a service used to send naked photos, a process known as sexting.

That misses the greater point of why Snapchat is so popular. As Sarah Lacey at PandoDaily points out, Snapchat represents an important shift in the way people think of photos. A century ago the process was painstaking and rare. Today photos represent a glut: anyone with a smartphone can take thousands of photos every year to record all of life's trappings. We take photos to capture a memory and share them widely through a social media site like Facebook.

But Snapchat heralds a more personal way of sharing photos, not to savour the past, but to invite another person into the present. Not to parade the best of oneself before a wider group, but give a more personal peek into real life. Since Snapchat's photos self-destruct after a few seconds, in a superficial way it replicates being with someone in a fleeting moment -- watching them make an unusual facial expression, perhaps -- and then never seeing that again, just as you would if you were there in person. There is value, albeit a different sort, attached to that sort of frictionless communication.

Lacey reports that an increasing number of college kids are using the app to communicate with their parents:

"Because the photos self-destruct, kids are far less inhibited to let their parents in on their worlds. The parents love it, because they get a sense of where their kid actually is and what they are actually doing in a way an email or even a phone call can’t convey."

Using a service to send self-destructing photos merely for "sexting" is a small part of a much bigger story about the way we deal with data, and the content that anyone can now create on their smartphones. Before it was assumed that anything we created should be stored and categorized for some future, as-yet-unknown circumstance. Now it's becoming clear that most of us have simply too much content to adequately handle -- one alternative may soon become to use captured content like photos, primarily for the present tense.

This speaks to what venture capitalist Mary Meeker has been referring to as a digital future that is "light on assets" -- in other words, one where our concept of the value of owning "stuff" changes. Creating content that will eventually destruct can make for highly dynamic discussions too, and one example is the website 4chan, the popular image board frequented by web-savvy individuals that automatically deletes all content on the site every 24 hours. The nine-year-old site is best known for spawning the hacktivist and trolling network Anonymous, and all manner of Internet memes and elements of Internet culture.

Snapchat has a ways to go before we can call it an established social network. Though its founders are rumored to be in the process of raising $8 million in funding from Benchmark Capital, co-founder Evan Spiegel, 22, and his four co-workers still work out of Spiegel's dad's house.

Still, 50 million photos a day is impressive for an app that was only launched in September 2011. If Facebook with its 1 billion users can replicate that kind of success, it could mark not only a step forward for Facebook but a shift in the way we all communicate.